No wonder Wawuyo Junior always gets it

Imagine a student who leaves school to get upkeep from his father and ends up rubbing shoulders with Forest Whitaker, Kerry Washington, David Oyelowo, James McAvoy and Gillian Anderson on the set of The Last King of Scotland.

That student was Michael Wawuyo Jr.

“The only actor I knew well was Whitaker.  My school, Jinja College was near Crested Crane Hotel where they were staying and when I arrived, I saw Whitaker whom I had seen in films, I became tongue tied when Kerry Washington introduced herself to me,” Wawuyo Jr says.

Over the years, Wawuyo Jr has gone full circle, joining  the industry through theatre, doing comedy with Theatre Factory, working with his cousin Emma Kakai,  joining friends to start a music group and releasing songs and videos, a video vixen, and model. In 2007, he joined his father on Stone Cold, a film Michael Wawuyo Snr wrote and Irene Kulabako directed.

“I asked my dad if I could just be his apprentice, he is an all-round filmmaker; he is a director, producer, special effects editor which he has done at a professional level. So, I carried his bags. It was fun seeing how everyone did what they had to do,” he says.

Wawuyo Jr did not get paid for that job, but says he did not know people got paid for film because there was no structure for this kind of thing.

 “I thought people simply worked and somehow got rich.”

But later, he worked with his father on another project. this time, they shared the screen and the film was, The Right to Life by Kwezi Kaganda. The Wawuyos starred alongside Pamela Keryeko, then, a director and actress was also breaking into the industry.

“That was before The Hostel,(TV drama) it was an edutainment film where she [Keryeko] played my girlfriend,” he says.

In the film, Keryeko’s character had HIV and was avoiding sleeping with her boyfriend even when he was demanding it. In this scene, Wawuyo Jr’s character comes home and finds her in the embrace of another man, Wawuyo Snr, her uncle he did not know of.

“I walk in when they are hugging and I am supposed to fight him. I was supposed to literally manhandle him and rough him up….. I failed. He laughed and told me that ‘this is the only chance in life to man handle me so, use it well’. I had to find a way around it and I succeeded.  It was such a good scene,” he  recalls.

Mentoring actors

Wawuyo Snr never wanted his son to follow the artistic path, he wanted him to pursue what many consider as normal education and make a living out of a formal career. Junior had initially wanted to study mass communication, but ended up studying information science, which he says he hated.

“I was under my dad’s care and he told me he did not want me to be part of the film industry because it was chaotic and unprofessional,” he says.

Wawuyo Snr used to juggle his love for film with a fulltime job at Coca Cola. Film was a by the way that most  times, he had to seek permission from supervisors to go and act.

Over the years, the father and son have shared a lot with the industry through acting and mentoring others. At the moment, Junior has also taken on mentorship.

“I am at a place where I can help someone acting for the first time or trying to get better at it. I came up with this thing that as actors, we need to school ourselves because some of these spaces may not be given to us. So, as the government still makes up its mind on creating such spaces, actors that have more experience can share  their knowledge. It is not about me teaching actors, it is about me bringing up something and we discuss it,” he says.

He says the main reason is to better actors, “our actors are being dismissed left, right, and centre.” He adds the industry is at a point where many actors are still taking the industry for granted that watching them on screen is even painful.

Since the year started, the actor has been keen on sharing what he has with different people. In August, he will be starting serious mentorship programmes though at the moment, he is still open for talks and seminars organised by other people.

For instance, at the beginning of April during one of the filmmakers gatherings, Film Club, he taught actors the importance of being humble while auditioning for a role, ensuring that you are directable and not arguing with your potential employers.

“I once lost a role. I went to audition in Kenya and they asked me a simple question and I became over confident and ended up answering what I had not been asked,” he says.

Luckily, at the moment the actor doesn’t audition for many of the Ugandan roles, most producers call him, while some such as Loukman Ali write characters specifically for him.

“I auditioned so many times, you would reach the theatre and the queue stretched to Dewinton Road,” he says.

The Hostel

He has been in the film industry earlier than most Ugandans may know, precisely, around 2007. Most Ugandans learnt about Wawuyo Jr as an actor on The Hostel, he portrayed Brother John, the Christian friend of Eleanor Nabwiso’s Sister Hope.

“I had initially auditioned for Odoch, I was sure I was getting it because I got a standing ovation, many of these people had never seen me do something like this,” he recalls.

Most of the people that auditioned him were known to him. For instance, Kulabako had seen him since he was five years old, as well as Kakai, their production manager, who is his cousin.

“I did the part and they were laughing, high-fiving, I thought I was killing it, then I got a call from Kakai, she said Odoch had been given to someone else, I asked her who? She said Daniel Omara,” he says.

These were slightly a few years after Omara had made his way onto the scene after contesting for Stand Up Uganda alongside Kenneth ‘Pablo’ Kimuli, Alex Muhangi and Patrick ‘Salvador’ Idringi. Omara was picked for the role because like Wawuyo, he nailed his audition and also spoke the language.

“Two weeks later, Kakai called again and told me, you may have missed out on Odoch, but there is this other role. Brother John,” he says.

Wawuyo describes Brother John as a slow shy guy, “a guy that was afraid of being touched by a girl, I do not know if it was a perception of him that as a Christian he should not be touched by women. But besides that I enjoyed playing him. He was the total opposite of who I was and I enjoy such roles,” he says.

Method acting

There are many processes different actors use such as classical, modern, chekhov and method. The method process emphasises practising to create a connection with the character by thinking about personal memories and emotions and connecting them with the character.  To make this happen, a set of practices and exercises are used including affective memory and sense memory.  

“I had no clue I was using this method but Frank, one of the head writers on The Hostel said so. They wrote this scene where Sister Hope had to tell Brother John that she was pregnant and he denied and jumped off the balcony and took off,” he says.

Initially, the actor was supposed to land on mattresses but to the crew’s disbelief, he asked them to remove the mattresses.

“I jumped from the second floor to the ground and took off. Then, Frank told me, ‘you work like a method actor,’ he recounts.

It is after that experience that he started reading about method acting and realised that he liked it.

Today, Wawuyo dives into his characters and immerses himself into their situations, trials and pains.

For example, when he did the short film Funeral Scene, he got himself feeding on only apples to lose weight so that he could achieve the look of a stage four cancer patient. Luckily, he got the help from a cancer patient with the same condition as his character and the same stage.

He lost weight and became unrecognisable and sadly, the patient that had even become his friend died.

“The role was taxing, emotionally, my mum was freaked out, my dad was ‘mad’, I was asking myself if that character could be executed but I still failed. One simple thing failed, the voice,” he says, adding that he usually gets out of the roles by travelling though he says he has not had straining roles like that. For the Funeral Scene, he had to seek counselling. But one of the things he does while winding down characters is hanging out with his eight-year-old son, father, sisters, mother and extended family.

About his mother, a sickler

Wawuyo Jr speaks passionately about his mother whom he says is a sickler, even if they were shooting somewhere and something happened, they have to find a way of being there for her.

Belief is that sicklers rarely leave beyond their 30th birthday. It is something the Wawuyos have been told a number of times and they know how blessed they are to have their mother around. He says she is the one that grounds them, especially those in the limelight like himself and his father.

“Even us, we wonder the favour that God has had on our household. Truth is, she has battled this, I learnt that she was confirmed a sickler when she was two and the fact that she is still here with us is humbling, I cannot take that for granted,” he says.

Wawuyo says he never knew a lot about sickle cells when he was younger. Because his mother is a sickler,  he is a carrier as well but in Senior Four, he dated a carrier whose sister  was a sickler.

“My parents were very much against it and we were not listening. I told them, that for us we are in love… but as I kept escorting her to see her sister in hospital and escorting my mother to hospital, I realised we were playing with something deadly,” he says.

He notes that he rarely spoke about his mother because he did not feel the need to, considering the fact that she is usually in pain. Pain they rarely can do anything about. But this year, he wants to use platforms he has gained through acting to create more awareness about sickle cell disease.

“When you are a carrier and I am one, that is it. We cannot be together. You could be in love but you need to understand what you are dealing with. Sickle cell strains marriages and drains relationships,” he says adding, “My mum had a crisis in 1990 and my baby sister suffered a lack of oxygen to her brain and was born with a brain condition, mental retardation.”

This year, the family will be coming together to create more awareness on sickle cell disease  and mental health. The Wawuyos will be having a walk from Mbale to the National Theatre.

“It is not a charity walk, it is one to create awareness,” he says.

He believes for sickle cells, more needs to be done as well as mental health - his argument is that a lot of efforts have been geared towards physical handicap and other issues people are facing, have been forgotten.

Did you know?

But there is more to the Wawuyo family,people only know the father and son. There are two sisters, Diana and Doreen living in London. Diana is a filmmaker, she acts and directs, in Uganda, she acted in the final episode of Centre 4.

Wawuyo was with his family when news broke that The Girl In The Yellow Jumper had got onto Netflix. He says he was taking care of his mother in hospital when he received the call; “Loukman said, you do not sound excited, I told him I was in hospital.”

How the man felt about watching himself on the platform such as Netflix for the first time or why he always works with Loukman, that is a story for another day.